Google plans to take on Amazon

GOOGLE IS PLANNING to launch an e-book store called Google Editions next year to compete with Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

The company said that the store would sell platform agnostic e-books and would open in the first half of next year with a catalogue of around 400,000 to 600,000 titles. Google said it didn't see the store as aimed at e-book readers but at anyone with a browser and an Internet connection.

“It will be a browser-based access," Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search's publisher partnership program, told Associated Press.

"The way the e-book market will evolve is by accessing the book from anywhere, from an access point of view and also from a geographical point of view."

The company indicated that the books would not be purchased and downloaded as with conventional e-book readers, but instead stored in a “cloud library.”

Google will be trying three different business models with the store. In the first it sells the book directly and takes a 37 per cent cut, or sell through the publisher or retailer with a different commission plan.

The Association of American Publishers, estimates that the e-book market in the US is worth $113 million, and is growing at 68 per cent a year. µ